Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)

Expert direction. Barely a wasted moment. Never boring. Excellent performances (yes, yes, Kathy Bates deserved her Oscar). Extremely effective thriller overall. And empty.

Yet again, as with so much Hollywood product, Misery is the equivalent of eating a bag of wet pork rinds and feeling like (what else?) crap immediately after. The very economy rendering this such a tight thrill ride contributes all the more to the film's pointlessness. With little context and few secondary characters (nor, Lawd knows, a dialectical mise-en-scène à la Sirk), the sadistic two-character story has to provide all the meaning. Instead, it provides pork rinds. I want my heart rate to increase for more than just expertly reduced storytelling, especially when it offers a sexist and condescending account of the lives of women who consumer romance fiction. Hey - there is a context after all.

And don't just bitch at me. Leonard Maltin didn't even dig it that much, stating that the Stephen King novel on which the film is based was more nuanced, a fact I will likely never confirm.

Hooray for Hollywood!

Grade: C+